WORK IN PROGRESS ARCHIVE
from "THE ART OF CHANGING YOUR MIND: THE WILL TO BE HEALTHY."©
From Chapter One: The World on Drugs.
Vaccinations. I am devoting a hefty part of this section on drugs to vaccines, because it offers a striking representation of most of the wrong-thinking of mainstream medicine.
There is probably no more vigorous medical controversy than surrounds vaccinations. One famous case of vaccine damage concerns the son of Ted Kuntz, a marriage and family therapist whose child suffered permanent seizure and profound intellectual impairment from a whooping cough vaccine, (25). In another widespread controversy, many blame the enormous rise of autism on multi-purpose vaccinations given to babies and children, which in a single shot combine the antibodies of many diseases. It is really impossible to know how many cases of damage to the neurological or other physiological system vaccine causes. When a problem appears, it is attributed to genes, or is regarded as just one of those terrible things. There is no way to ascertain how many vaccinations are really not needed or are actually dangerous. Their use is highly problematic, not only in respect to babies and children, but across the board. Yet they have simply become the unquestioned orthodox norm
Although flu vaccines are a staple of the medical establishment,
sacrosanct in private and public health systems, there are a few courageous skeptics and some outright opponents, like Tom Jefferson. Jefferson is a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence. He points out that flawed methodology--cohort studies--is used to prove vaccination effectiveness. Researches using cohort studies claim that flu shots prevented the deaths from all causes by 50 per cent; people who received a flu shot in the fall were half as likely to die from any cause in the winter. (Emphasis mine.)
But that is impossible, says Dr. Jefferson and other nonbelievers: “For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent, it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a vaccine, that’s a miracle.”
Another unbeliever, Dr. Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with Group Health Research Center in Seattle, argued that the apparent mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be a “healthy user effect” healthier people, including the whole population of children whose death rate is low, get flu shots. Whereas those who are less likely to get flu shots are the elderly, sick or bedridden--those whose “normal” death rate is 60 % higher than among those who get flu shots. In other words, the higher death rate among the unvaccinated and the lower death rate among the vaccinated cannot be attributed to the vaccine.”
Other evidence for negating the value of flu vaccines reveals that in 1989 only 15 percent of people over age 65 in the U.S. and Canada were vaccinated. Today, more than 65 percent are vaccinated. Yet death rates among the elderly during flu season have increased rather than decreased.
Vaccination is universally credited with erasing infectious diseases, yet amazingly, there has been no study comparing a vaccinated population with an unvaccinated population to discover whether over time vaccination is safe and effective. In Third World countries, where sanitation is abominable, there is a continued high incidence of infectious diseases, in spite of vaccination rates of nearly 100 per cent!
Credible scientists believe that the prevention of disease and the control of epidemics are not to be found in a vaccine, but in the society’s attention to the hygiene and living conditions of its population. “Epidemics always tell us something about the way we live. The Black Death, for example, was an unabashed commentary on overpopulation, under nutrition and peasant architecture--rat-friendly thatched roofs. Tuberculosis is always a signal of much homelessness. Cholera wags a finger at water quality. AIDs reminded us that sex is never safe and that promiscuity has biological consequences. (Syphilis gave us the same message, but as we developed treatments, we forgot it). As to the “message” of SARS; it originated in a China province where the air, water, and general living conditions, especially among the poor, are filthy,” (30).
The concerns of vaccination skeptics extend far beyond the arena of flu shots. Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz says there is “vaccine-injury certainty” related to vaccines for polio, smallpox, anthrax, and hepatitis B. among others. “Most recently the vaccine for Lyme disease crippled approximately 750,000 people within months of its release and prior to its recall by the FDA’s ”hair raising statistic” Dr. Horowitz also points out that many cases of a type of lung cancer called mesothelioma, widely attributed to exposure to asbestos, are caused by the SV-40 virus contained in the polio vaccination. As well, SV-40 has been found in 33 percent of the osteosarcoma bone cancers studied and in 40% of other bone cancers, as well as in brain and other cancers. Dr.Horowitz goes on: “A growing body of scientific evidence strongly suggests vaccines are largely responsible for increasing cases of autism and other learning disabilities, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, Lupus, MS, ALS, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, hay fever, allergies, chroming draining ear infections, type 1 autoimmune diabetes, and many, many more pandemics. (31)
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